Unholy Pursuits: The Wayward Parsons of Grub Street by E.S. Turner, The Book Guild, 224pp, £15.95 in UK
Now and then, while wandering the literary thoroughfare, one stumbles into a side street and comes across a small treasure, a book, unheralded, that takes up one's whole interest for the space of some golden hours. Such a volume Unholy Pursuits, a chuckle-inducing account of the rather rum clerics who plied their trade of insult and invective in Grub Street during the latter half of the 18th century. These parsons flourished in the reign of George III, when the press was notorious for its licence: "Having answered a higher Call they found time to respond to the baser call of newspapers and the stage - the contentious, scurrilous, mud-slinging world of Grub Street in what passed for an age of enlightenment."
This was at a time when "In the pecking order of society the journalist rated somewhere between apothecary and cat-skinner," so "Whatever drove such a man to break caste, whether it was penury, a sense of unfulfillment or the curse of over-articulacy, at least his courage had to be admired, for in his new calling he faced severe occupational hazards." Casting the biggest shadow here is the Reverend Sir Henry Bate Dudley, who ran the Morning Post in its disreputable infancy, a larger-than-life figure who "fought a string of duels, went to gaol for libelling the Duke of Richmond, lost a fortune in an investment which reeked of simony, rode down rioters in the Fens and successfully blackmailed the Prince Regent, ending up as rector in Co Wexford." Then there is his successor on the Morning Post, the Reverend William Jackson, who wrote a scabrous poem denouncing the moral state of the nation and called for a heavenly punishment which would wipe out sodomites, while sparing whores. He died of self-administered poison in a Dublin courtroom, having been convicted of high treason.
And what can one say of the Reverend Charles Churchill, the satiric poet, who booked "a fine honest strumpet" into the newly opened Magdalen House as "a reward for not stealing his watch when they passed the night together on an asparagus patch in Battersea"? Or of the Reverend John Horne Tooke, the son of a prosperous court poulterer, who lost an eye in a fight at Eton and libelled the Speaker of the House of Commons and had to spend a year in prison, drinking gallons of claret to stave off jail fever? The book overflows with eccentrics of all types, with the art of vituperation linking them together. The poets Dryden and Pope fought running verbal battles with their bookseller-publishers, Dryden writing of Jacob Tonson: "With leering looks, bull-faced and freckled fair;/With two left legs and Judas-colour'd hair,/And frowsy pores that taint the ambient air," while Pope, in the Dunciad, portrays Edmund Curll as being spattered with ordure and winning a high-pissing contest.
Other well-known literary figures also feature: Daniel Defoe as a paid agent of the Whigs writing for Mist's Weekly Journal - later to be renamed Fog's Weekly Journal when its printer, Mist, saw fit to fly to France; Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who is glimpsed as part of the Prince Regent's entourage of "hell-bent bucks, dubious colonels, interchangeable mistresses, prize-fighters, jockeys and comic poets, topped up by the promiscuous Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and the unwashed Duke of Norfolk"; and Laurence Sterne, who is reviled by the Reverend Dr Dodd for the coarseness of Tristram Shandy - it is worth recording that Dodd was later hanged at Tyburn for forgery. The King, George III, was the main target of the "blowflies of Grub Street", caricaturists who feasted on the cloacal, as when they "portrayed the monarch jet-propelled by his own monstrous farts, or sharing a two-seater privy with his raddled queen". But anyone, be he friend or foe, high or low, was liable to come in for abuse, affront or aspersion, at a time when the art of insult was the most venerated public show.
E.S. Turner, who is ninety years young, has gleefully thrown light on these "underemployed and broken-backed divines" who found that insulting all and sundry gave them a purpose in life and also, in many cases, a means of escaping debtors' prison. They may have been pests to those they vilified, but, reading about them now, one is buoyed up by many a belly-laugh.
Vincent Banville is a writer and critic